@ Mario Nascimbene 2003-2023

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BIOGRAPHY

Gifted with a keen musical talent, Mario Nascimbene enrolled at the "Giuseppe Verdi" Conservatory of Music in Milan, where he was a student of Ildebrando Pizzetti.
After obtaining a diploma in composition and orchestral conducting, he initially dedicated himself to the composition of symphonic and chamber music. In 1941 he was asked to write the musical commentary for the film L'amore canta, directed by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli.
The success of the film pushed him to dedicate himself almost exclusively to the composition of soundtracks for the "seventh art". During the decade 1945-1955, his cinematographic activity grew and he established himself as one of the newest and most original Italian cinematographic musicians, also showing considerable versatility and flexibility. Nascimbene, in fact, casually goes on to compose soundtracks for films of human and social commitment, comedies of manners, dramatic and sentimental films, historical blockbusters.
On every occasion he always demonstrates a high degree of professionalism, sometimes accompanied by particularly new and original ways of conceiving the relationship between the musical commentary and the subject of the cinematographic work.
Nascimbene is unanimously considered by critics to be one of the best authors of soundtracks in Italian cinema of the 20th century, thanks above all to the originality of the innovations he introduced in the writing of the score, including the use of non-orchestral instruments, such as the wind chime. and the mouth organ, and of sound sources coming from everyday life, such as the ticking of a clock, the bell of a bicycle or the noise of typewriters used in the soundtrack of the film Roma ore 11 (1952). During his career Mario Nascimbene will establish lasting artistic and cultural partnerships with renowned directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe De Santis, for whom he will write the music, as well as for the aforementioned Roma ore 11 with Lucia Bosé and Raf Vallone, for Giorni d'amore (1955) with Marcello Mastroianni; but also of Men and Wolves (1956) with Yves Montand and Silvana Mangano, in which he used themes from the musical folklore of Abruzzo achieving great dramatic effectiveness, and Valerio Zurlini, for whom he wrote the musical comments for the films Violent Summer (1959) with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Eleonora Rossi Drago; The Girl with the Suitcase (1961) with Claudia Cardinale, The Soldiers (1965) with Mario Adorf and Tomas Milian; The First Quiet Night (1972) with Alain Delon, just to name a few.
Mario Nascimbene's work also received acclaim overseas, and orders soon arrived from Hollywood for the creation of soundtracks for famous films including The Barefoot Countess (1954) directed by Joseph Leo Mankiewicz with Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart and Edmond O'Brien, of Alexander the Great (1956) by Robert Rossen with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, of A Farewell to Arms (1957) by Charles Vidor with Rock Hudson, of The Vikings (1958) by Richard Fleischer with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (1959) by King Vidor, with Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida, of Barabbas (1961) by Richard Fleischer with Anthony Quinn, Vittorio Gassman and Silvana Mangano, of Doctor Faustus (1967) directed by Neville Coghille and Richard Burton with the same actor as the protagonist.
In the television field, Nascimbene was the author of equally far-reaching works, such as the drama Aeneid by Franco Rossi (1971-1972), re-proposed several times by RAI, and, before that, the beautiful Gli Atti degli Apostoli by Roberto Rossellini (1969 ), completely and splendidly set to music with the solo flute of the great Severino Gazzelloni; this is just to mention two of the best-known works for the small screen.
He also tried his hand at opera music with the opera Faust in Manhattan directed by maestro Franco Ferrara and filmed at the RAI auditorium in Naples, directed by Sandro Bolchi, starring the Baritone Antonio Boyer. In 1975 he took care of the music for Roberto Rossellini's film Il Messia.
In the 80s and 90s his commitments as a lecturer and teacher of seminars on the composition of film music increased. His latest works are the soundtracks of Il vento e l'amore - Progetto Manzù, an educational film by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Rome directed in 1982 by Glauco Pellegrini on the life of the famous sculptor, presented at the fiftieth anniversary of the Venice Film Festival, and Blue Dolphin documentary directed by Giorgio Moser in 1990.
In 1991 he was awarded a special "David di Donatello" in recognition of his career. In addition to having composed the soundtracks of over 400 films, Mario Nascimbene also appeared once on the big screen as an actor, playing the part of Prof. Ferrara in the film Story of a Woman, directed in 1969 by Leonardo Bercovici.

One of the fundamental elements from which Nascimbene drew for the creation of his extraordinary musical inventions, so exclusive and at the same time so musically formal, was his enormous and innate passion for cinema; a love that has never faded for an instant since he was a boy and under whose continuous dynamics he has come to revolutionize the techniques of recording and manipulating sounds, up to the point of creating something truly "new", which comes directly from his studio in Rome, "il Mixerama".
Mario Nascimbene and his music and his way of making music: a combination, certainly, of the most extraordinary, of the most incredible, where really, like in a fantastic film, anything can happen from one moment to the next! He was an artist in the truest, most constructive sense of the term: dreaming, imagining and creating. The "Mario Nascimbene Award" is dedicated to his memory, which is given to young soundtrack composers.

Severino Gazzelloni and Mario Nascimbene